[Meego-community] Community working group - status update

Fri Mar 12 15:17:04 CST 2010

Hi,

Summary:
- A seed of the Community working group exists with 4 members. To be formalized by the TSG soon.
- News/Planet, Bugzilla and Forum need to be in place by the end of the month.
- We will help the TSG running their bi-weekly IRC meetings. The first one to be held asap.
- The MeeGo Summit work needs to start now if we want a great even by Sep/Oct.

Verbose:

This week a group of Intel and Nokia employees have met in Portland (Oregon, US) to discuss and work on the areas needing more attention for the now famous MeeGo Day 1, coming at then end of this month.

Tero Kojo and myself went there primarily to agree on the official creation of the Community working group: http://wiki.meego.com/Proposal_for_a_Community_working_group . We had very good discussions mainly with Dawn Foster and Mike Shaver from Intel and now we are overall in sync. In fact we were in sync before, but we could be only sure after having the chance to discuss all the main topics through a couple of days. The four of us had also a meeting with Valtteri and Imad (the Technical Steering Group) and now we have a clear starting point and the main sketches for a plan. The idea is to bring all this to the public light so we all can start working in the open ways expected in a free software project.

What comes now is a well founded working assumption to be formalized by the TSG in their first meeting. Please comment, ask, question and challenge anything you think that can be clearer or improved.

- The Community working group will be created as an official team within the MeeGo project, with identified roles and members. In the following days we need to fine tune the mission and scope defined at http://wiki.meego.com/Proposal_for_a_Community_working_group . Deadline: latest by the end of the month.

- We need to define the dymamics of MeeGo working groups but the assumption is that each group has a couple of coordinators driving decisions and intefacing with the TSG when needed, some more members with official responsibilities and then doors open to whoever else wants to follow and contribute. Dawn Foster (Intel) and Quim Gil (Nokia) will be the coordinators of the Community working group. Mike Shaver (Intel) and Tero Kojo (Nokia) will be the initial owners of the web services and server infrastructure, together with a member of the Linux Foundation tbd. We will go through the people currently responsible of key areas at meego.com, maemo.org and moblin.org and we will invite the obvious cases right away. The idea is to start small and fully operative, growing when needed but not for the sake of growth. Note that anybody can be fully involved and volunteer for tasks and responsibilities, being officially nominated or not. 

- News/Planet, Bugzilla and Forum need to be in place latest by Day 1 (end of this month). We will start humble with the news aggregator, growing in complexity towards a Social News model like http://maemo.org/news if there is an interest and someone willing to drive the work. Bugzilla is basically in place now, having gone already through a revision from several people involved in moblin.org and maemo.org bugzillas. About the forum, a decision about the engine will be made latest next Friday, letting ourselves a week to implement it. The biggest question marks at the moment are whether the Linux Foundation has a policy or determinant opinion about the license and who would put in place a phpBB forum if that would be the preferred option. The rest of scenarios seem to be clear and by now there is no option ruled out. Have no doubt that there will be a MeeGo forum in place by the end of the month.

- The Community working group is here to help with the web infrastructure and online communication of any community team. We will help the TSG organizing and handling the bi-weekly IRC meetings, to start asap with the first one. The setting initially discussed includes a public agenda, a process to propose topics and a moderated IRC channel with Imad and Valtteri with writing permissions, Dawn posting questions received via PM and Quim playing with the bot in order to generate nice meeting minutes automagically.

- Everybody wants a MeeGo Summit as an evolution of the Maemo and Moblin summits. If we want one by Sep/Oct we are actually running a bit late. We need to agree on a common vision in order to write a list of requirements to host candidates. Nokia and Intel will be the main sponsors of this first MeeGo Summit, so we will have a first internal round to get an estimation of common interests and pooled funds. In the meantime please go ahead with any ideas. Once the vision and the budget is clear all the discussion and work will go public. Money related topics to be kept a bit private among the organizers, including any individuals assuming concrete responsibilities.

And that's more or less it. Let's concentrate in these items with the immediate goal of delivering results before the end of the month. The MeeGo community will be fully operative and ready to walk and grow after that!

--
Quim Gil + N900 
open source advocate 
Maemo Devices @ Nokia